Amiri
Baraka died. I love the opening lines from his
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, written when he was still
LeRoi Jones:

Lately, I've become accustomed to the
way

The ground opens up and envelopes me

Each time I go out to walk the dog.

Or the broad edged silly music the wind

Makes when I run for the bus...

Things have come to that.

I went to the launch party of my friend
Sam's book,
her first, a feminist-literary-criticism-memoir (not only has she
written a book, she's invented a genre!), and watched in what was
probably forlorn envy as she signed books for her friends, and
wondered why I felt to ask her myself would be tacky. I had a long
conversation with someone who knows cast members of Nirbhaya,
who fumed at the lack of emotional or psychological support given to
those women telling their stories of being raped; and I was generally
doleful about how, for an industry dedicated to expressions of
empathy, theatre is astonishingly uncaring (the show's the thing). I
also learned that an Actionette
friend was fired by Marie Claire just before Christmas, then phoned
by them just after New Year because they had a hole on their pages
and would she be OK to fill it?

I spent 45 minutes in a branch of
Nationwide opening little savings accounts for my kids, and
contemplating how doing stuff online lets me, everyone, forget how a
lot of people live. Exacerbates my impatience. Makes literature oddly
vital as a site of encounter with other cultures, people without
privilege. A thought mostly connected to reading Sam Selvon's The
Lonely Londoners between Christmas and New Year: what an exquisite
novel, so direct in its realisation that nothing is right, so radiant
with hope. The pages about the natural affinity between London's
immigrant black and working-class white communities are fiercely
political yet tender; the final pages, addressing the impossibility
of leaving London, the way this city claims you as its own, burrowed
to the heart of my own family's immigrant experience.

Fergus
Evans told the Guardian via twitter that I
should be included on an alternative Stage 100 theatre list, for
continuing to challenge what a critic should be.

I wrote an email to Mark Ball, artistic
director of LIFT, who
employed me in November to create editorial copy for their 2014
programme brochure being published in February, to say thank you:
“The ongoing shifts in theatre practice are absolutely crying out
for shifts in media coverage: I'm completely astounded that I'm
getting to do this with you. This isn't flattery: the Guardian called
me two days ago to say they're terminating my contract... There is so
much really stupid thinking around arts organisations commissioning
their own magazines: I feel like with this brochure you're giving me
the space to create something that has journalistic integrity, yet
the bouncy excitedness that will get people buying tickets. Fucking
brilliant.” (This was before people started making me rewrite my
copy: even in paradise, there is compromise.)

Sometimes my work feels like the most
important thing in the world. And sometimes it feels like a colossal
waste of time.

Sometimes I feel like the only thing
that's important to me is to write about theatre, because to do so is
to write about society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism,
inequality, privilege, poverty, psychology, parenting, climate
change, art, cinema, books, long walks in the countryside, immigrant
experience, second-generation immigrant experience, belonging, not
belonging, crowded urban living, utopian longing, the poleaxing
confusion of “how
you live with other people [and] how you live with yourself”.
It doesn't matter that a piece on here attracts maybe 300 hits (of
that, how many people actually read to the end? Or past the first
paragraph?). If I can bolster, challenge, inspire, entertain, incite
into some kind of positive action one or two people each time, that's
enough.

Sometimes I think, unless I'm trying to
communicate with a massive audience, trying to effect real change in
understanding and appreciation of theatre at a micro level, the world
at macro, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

A jury found the shooting of Mark
Duggan to be lawful and several London fire stations were closed last
week. Who knows, maybe I could be doing something about that.

*

I've been expecting the call from the
Guardian for almost as many years as I've been freelancing. By the
standards of writers' pay, I've been being overpaid. I worked out
that I got paid roughly £44 an hour for the Carrie Cracknell piece.
That's patently ludicrous. Under the new pay terms, I'd get closer to
£28 an hour. As an isolated figure, that's still ludicrous.

There are no isolated figures.

This month I'm writing two features for
the Guardian; from September to December I wrote none. It's not that
I didn't pitch features: three out of four ideas I send are rejected,
and even those accepted don't always work out. That's natural, but
time-consuming. I spent the weeks doing a combination of unpaid work,
freelance work, and applications for grants, both of which were
rejected. I love my work. But it's
still work. And I'm constantly working. Sometimes I wonder what
there is to show for it.

In the conventional sense, my Guardian
salary was the thing to show for it. It's also been a security
blanket. Last summer, Andrew Haydon asked why I don't have the
courage of my convictions: if the structures within which I live are
so abhorrent to me, why not walk away from them? I'm full of
admiration for the way he's successfully achieved that – becoming
in the process theatre's key critical voice to boot. But he doesn't
have a family; I have. [Note added 22/1/14: Andrew pointed out, very gently, on twitter today that he does have a family, he just doesn't have dependents. I know from reading Stella Duffy's blog how hurtful this kind of unconscious expression of heteronormative superiority can be, and wish I'd been more thoughtful with my phrasing.] Families lock you into structures,
responsibilities. I feel I ought to embrace being shoved out of a
traditional financial structure. Instead I just feel scared.

*

When I was 21 and 22 and lost in the
wilderness, not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life
except that I didn't want to sit on the reception desk at my parents'
factory, or in any other way join their business, I truly believed
the most precious commodity in newspapers was space. Column inches. I
sent in ideas, which were ignored. I wrote reviews, which were
rejected. You had to be really fucking good to be given space in
newspapers, and for a long time I wasn't good enough. Money was no
object in this industry; when I got my first job, I was shocked by
how much I earned (£26,000pa – enough to save up a deposit to buy
my own flat, admittedly at now distant prices). Newspapers were happy
to pay you – but give you column inches? Dream on.

Now I wonder if I was kidding myself:
after all, my newly affluent parents were always at the edge of the
wilderness, supporting me. But I also wonder whether the situation
has reversed. The internet has given newspapers limitless space, but
advertising revenue has disappeared in that black hole and now money
is their most precious commodity. You can write for them, but be
paid? That's the tricky part.

*

I've been walking around like a sack of
broken china.

(Things have come to that.)

I've been thinking that, finally, I've
been found out for the talentless fraud I really am.

(Things have come to that.)

I've been feeling sorry for myself,
because theatre is my life, but now I'm not earning my own money, how
can I afford to buy tickets? And who will give me press tickets for a
blog review that maybe 300 people will read?

(Where do I even start on the
self-centredness on this? How do I expect theatre practitioners to
pay their rent if people aren't buying tickets? Isn't part of the
problem with newspapers that no one wants to pay for them any more?
When was the last time I actually bought a newspaper? I get my news
from twitter, read the few articles that catch my attention online,
expect everything for free. Of course the economics are fucked: but I
can't ignore my role in making them so.)

And that this is the push I need to
work properly on Dialogue, and on reinventing what it is to write
about theatre; to challenge myself as a writer; to discover a new
audience, maybe not a massive or a mainstream audience, but possibly
an audience that doesn't yet know that it wants to read about
theatre, and all the things that writing about theatre entail.
Society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism, inequality...

It's the push I need to stop sitting
tentatively on the outside of Chris
Goode & Company, and properly embrace the extraordinary
opportunity he gives me.

It's the push I need to build on the
work I've been doing with Fuel/New
Theatre in Your Neighbourhood, to stop running scared from the
Shunt book idea, to help Exeunt/theatremagazine
become vital.

It might have been the push I needed to
get the novels written, except that over Christmas I read a novel
that was fine, serviceable, essentially not very good, and was forced
to admit to myself that if I wrote a novel in time for turning 40,
this is how it would read. A depressing truth, tempered by the fact
that Penelope
Fitzgerald was 58 before she published a book. I still have two
decades to become good enough for myself.

The hardest thing, and I feel pretty
stupid saying this, will be learning to say “it's Maddy Costa”
when I call people, rather than “it's Maddy from the Guardian”.
My identity has been tied up in that newspaper for 14 years. I've no
idea if I'm ready to stand up on my own. But I'm going to have to.

That, and get used to not getting paid.

*

The days between sending the piece in
and waiting for it to be published were spent working with LIFT. I'm
late posting this because every spare hour lately has been devoted to
that. It's blissful. I'm working on paper again, making pages, making
a magazine. It's brought home to me how much I miss the tangible,
miss commissioning other writers, miss working with designers,
framing stories, seeing things from a reader's perspective. I miss
the sense of achievement in seeing a project through to completion.
Sometimes I think I'm still heartbroken by my failure to become
Guardian arts editor.

On two of those days, working in the
design office, this song played:

Both times I stopped freefalling and
started floating. And now every time I listen I feel it rushing
through my blood and it's like somersaults.

(Dug this one out again too. Also
magic.)

*

There's a longer version of the Carrie
Cracknell, by the way. (There always is.) Bizarrely, someone called
Hobo O'Riley seems to have decided to post up his comment on the
Guardian feature not there but on two unconnected posts here. He must
really want to talk to me about it. At the point when I spoke to
Carrie, I hadn't seen the explicit video for Blurred Lines, and the
“prudishness” question was mostly directed at myself. I've since
seen the explicit, and my problem with it can be boiled down to four
words: naked women, dressed men. When that gets reversed, the
conversation will start feeling very different.

Talking to Carrie has inspired me
finally to read Susan Faludi's Backlash,
a book I've owned for two decades but only ever dipped into,
cover-to-cover. It ought to be out of date by now. So far,
depressingly, infuriatingly, not quite astonishingly, it isn't. Dialogue is lining up a Theatre Club on Blurred Lines: I'm really looking forward to it.

Summer 2013 and controversy
is raging. Robin Thicke's supremely catchy song
Blurred Lines – in which a man in a nightclub tries to persuade a
beautiful woman to stop being a “good girl” and do what he knows
she really wants – is being banned from student unions up and down
the country, condemned in blogs and newspapers for promoting
rape culture, and topping pop charts across the
globe. All this is fuelled by the song's video, in which – in the
explicit version – women wearing nothing but silken G-strings and
clompy shoes cavort around three men in suits who clearly can't
believe their luck.

For theatre director Carrie Cracknell,
who is directing a new show for the National Theatre Shed
deliberately named after the song, Blurred Lines is a red rag. When I
wonder whether it's prudishness that makes people recoil from it, she
argues: “It's really easy for women to get accused of being
prudish, but there is an absolute line about sexual consent which
cannot be blurred. The rage I feel in relation to that song is about
the idea of strong men, fully dressed, animalising and brutalising a
group of scantily clad women who apparently are empowered and
completely in control of their bodies.

“Of course sex is part of our life
and not something we should repress or censor, but rape is not sex,
and non-consensual sex for young women is a massive problem. A whole
generation of young boys and girls are growing up and their first
sexual experiences are pornography which is deeply hateful and
misogynistic and full of violence, and this song is the tip of that
iceberg. It has to take responsibility for the normalisation of that.
Anyway, rant over.” And she stops, suddenly sheepish.

A willowy, elegant 33-year-old,
Cracknell is all thoughtful restraint on the surface, but seething
beneath. It seems odd that she should feel the need to apologise for
expressing herself strongly, but it turns out this has been a running
theme in the Blurred Lines rehearsal room. “That anxiety about
being strident or pushy comes back to the socially constructed idea
of gender,” she suggests, “and how women feel they have to find a
feminine version of power to get what they want, while anything that
feels outwardly aggressive or masculine is held back in some way.”

For Blurred Lines, which opens this
week, she's working with eight female actors – including Sinead
Matthews, Ruth Sheen, Claire Skinner and Michaela Coel – and a male
writer, Nick Payne, to devise the show in the rehearsal room.
Together they've been improvising a series of scenes that tackle the
representation of women across film, television, theatre and pop.
They're also contemplating casual misogyny, the normalisation of the
sex industry, rape culture, and ongoing problems to do with work and
parenting.

It's useful, Cracknell says, to have a
male writer taking part: Payne describes himself as a feminist, and
argues that the issues with which they're grappling are not women's
only. “Nick said in rehearsal one day: a lot of this is a male
problem. Rape is a male problem. Men are not trained as boys that
they might become rapists, they're not taught in sex education that
they have to take responsibility for whether a girl says yes or no.
Of course we could argue that it should be a female playwright, but
his perspective and searching and questioning have been as relevant
as mine.”

Apart from Thicke's song, Blurred Lines
has its roots in the work that pulled Cracknell into the mainstream:
her 2012 production of A Doll's House, the Ibsen play championed by
feminists because it depicts a woman walking out on her husband and
children in an attempt to discover her real self. The production,
starring Hattie Morahan as a fluttering, manipulative Nora, had two
successful runs at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the
West End; it moves to New York in February.

“The first question we asked when we
started making A Doll's House,” says Cracknell, “was: what does
the play look like now? What's the relationship between the gender
politics of the 1890s and the world we live in? The thing that Hattie
drew out was this idea that Nora's power is completely seated in her
sexuality. That really struck me, because of this idea that women are
more sexualised now than they've ever been, or trying to move towards
an ever-narrowing ideal of what it means to be beautiful and
therefore powerful.”

Are things really worse now, or is the
problem that we expect decades of feminism to have made things
better? “Women have always been judged on how they look more than
men, women have always been objectified more than men,” Cracknell
agrees. “What happens now is a pernicious, deep-rooted connection
between global capitalism and an unobtainable physical ideal. The
desire for profit of those big beauty firms and of our television
culture, and the way that those things are hooking into each other,
feels really overwhelming.”

To coincide with the stage production,
Cracknell made a short film for the Young Vic and the Guardian, in
which Nora – again played by Morahan – is updated to a modern
working mother, falling to pieces as she struggles with her
impossible juggling act. Payne co-wrote it with her, and had a strong
influence on her thinking about both Noras when he handed her a copy
of Kat Banyard's wake-up call to a generation of post-feminists, The
Equality Illusion. Reading it, Cracknell says, “I had a feminist
awakening. I'm of a generation that to some extent have been told
that we're equal, that women have every opportunity men have. But I
believe Kat's thesis: the equality we'd been sold was an illusion.
Women are still disproportionately disempowered in public life and
being paid less than men, while sexual harassment and violence are
endemic in our culture.”

None of this occurred to Cracknell as a
teenager. “I was raised with the idea that it was irrelevant that I
was a woman: you just had to get on with being funny, being kind and
working hard.” Back then, theatre was a hobby; her real ambition
was to be a politician. She had a “strong left-wing upbringing”:
her mother was a primary school teacher and latterly head; her father
a businessman who taught at Oxford Brookes University and became a
local councillor. “The first time I voted was for my dad. This idea
of the right to vote was such a profound thing in our house,”
Cracknell recalls. She studied history at Nottingham with full
intentions of becoming an MP, but theatre snared her in her first
year. Now she pins her socialist hopes on her nephew, who is also
studying history and politics at Nottingham and wants to run the
Labour party. “I've asked if I can be in his cabinet on gender and
culture,” she laughs.

She spent a few years assisting
directors including Dominic Dromgoole and Katie Mitchell, then at 26
became the youngest artistic director in the country, co-running the
Gate in London with Natalie Abrahami. “We had a brilliant five
years where we got to find our own identity make loads of public
fuck-ups in a quite joyful teenage way,” she says. “Natalie and I
were interested in experimenting with form, in what theatre and dance
look like when they're together, so it always felt like this punk
little venue.”

She managed to combine that with having
two children, now aged two and four (they have a starring role in the
Nora film, where they get abandoned on a trampoline). Cracknell won't
talk about how she balances work and motherhood, but does admit that
she finds balancing her own ambitions complex. “My desire to parent
is as strong now as my desire to move forward. But I feel calm about
making a bit less work, and enjoy that work more as a consequence,
focusing on it more, having more time to develop it. A Doll's House
was born out of a year of preparation because I was on maternity
leave; I probably couldn't have made that work without that space to
cook it in my mind.”

Rather than her own struggle with
childcare arrangements, she prefers to comment on the bigger picture:
“In Blurred Lines we've been doing quite a lot of research into the
economics of how parenting affects the female work force. There's an
elite 15% of hyper-educated women who are in many respects echoing
the working patterns of men, very long hours, completely committed to
their careers. A proportion of them have children and tend to go back
to work quite quickly, and can therefore afford childcare and just
about make that work. The financial gap is growing between that group
and women who work in part-time, less well-paid or less skilled jobs
who can't always afford formalised or flexible childcare and
therefore can't affect change over their salaries or over the kinds
of roles they can take on.”

Theatre tends to be low-paid with long
hours, so where Cracknell fits into that picture isn't clear. Again,
it's not something she's comfortable going into. So far, she says,
being a woman hasn't diminished her own opportunities: mostly she's
been able to do the work she wants to do, and she's been given some
fantastic opportunities. Alongside her West End debut with A Doll's
House, last year she directed her first opera, a well-received
Wozzeck for ENO. But she feels a more general frustration with
theatre culture: “It's still a male-dominated world because the
stories we tell are inherited from a culture in which women weren't
allowed to do those things. And we still predominately think the
stories of men are more important and more interesting than the
stories of women.

“We're only in the second generation
in which women have really been able to take full control in public
life and therefore we don't have all of those stories yet. We have to
understand who those characters are, we have to take the female
narrative out of the domestic and into the public.” Recently she
was invited to direct a play for the National's biggest space, the
Olivier, and was startled by how difficult it was to find a female
character with the “scale or scope of emotional depth” to fill
the room. Somewhat predictably, the play she's going to direct is a
Greek tragedy, Medea.

That's in June; before that she'll be
at the Royal Court, directing a
new play dissecting rock'n'roll celebrity by
Simon Stephens, and contributing to the life of the building as
associate director. One of her key tasks is dealing with gender
imbalance. “An American actress brilliantly suggested that you
could take every screenplay and change half the male character names
to female ones. Why can't the doctor or the policeman or lawyer or
the judge just be women? Sometimes I think at the Court we can do
that, we can encourage writers to think of their protagonist as a
woman without actually changing very many of the characteristics.”

Despite
that early ambition to become an MP, Cracknell is constantly
surprised by the extent to which politics, gender or otherwise, now
govern her theatre-making. “I used to call my work 'political with
a small p': it was about the human experience. As I get older, I
understand that the human experience is at the heart of a bigger
experience, and I've found that really liberating and intellectually
stimulating. Rather than my work always being about the story, it's
about the context for the story as well.”

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